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“Give me some Sugar”

I’ve been getting more in touch with my dietary health and something glaring has been bothering me for the entire time we’ve been doing this little project. How much sugar should I be taking in each day? I realize that supposedly the ideal is *no* sugar, but I’m quite sure we’ll find that doing so ends up destroying some organ or function. It seems highly unlikely that creatures who are so happy to eat fruit would not thusly be made to function well with sugar.

So I did what any sane person would do, I pondered it for a night, and then finally I googled it. The US states something obscene like 20% of your diet should/could consist of sugar. This is largely because of just how big of a douchebag the sugar industry is. I’m not entirely shocked that there is no bastion where capitalism hasn’t tainted it, but that’s a digression that I feel is not properly expressing my view (I’m not as negative as I sometimes sound).

The amount that I’ve found that appears to be widely agreed upon is 36 grams per day or for those of us unfortunate enough to live with this god forsaken “standard” system it’s 9 teaspoons. This seems like a fairly modest amount, especially when you wager the average American is taking in between 26 and 135 pounds of sugar per year. That’s between .07 and .36 pounds of sugar per day.

Since I’m kind of fond of math, even with my inability to use it properly consistently I wanted to work this out further. There are 96 teaspoons in a pound. So if you are taking in .07 pounds a day that’s 6.72 teaspoons on the lower end of the American diet and 34.56 teaspoons on the high end. I’m not quite yet sure where I fall on this spectrum. But you figure I put one teaspoon (perhaps less) of sugar into each cup of coffee I have. The instant Korean coffee I have at work has 12 grams of sugar or ~2.8 teaspoons of sugar. So unsurprisingly I use about half as much sugar as a premade package does. However you can cheat and pinch the base of the instant coffee and about half the sugar will not come out (since it settles to the bottom in shipping).

This means I take in, just through coffee, 7.2 pounds of sugar per year. That is quite high though I’m still well below the median amounts listed above. Considering my drink of choice is water I am very interested to get an estimate on how much sugar I take in a week. I’m going to (try) record what I eat and see on average how much sugar I take in per day. Then we’ll assume the same basic consumption over the course of a year and see where I stand .